http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
AL GORE has promised so much "priority" legislation once he becomes
president that it'll make FDR's legendary first 100 days seem like he
was playing hearts most of the time during the spring of 1933.

If I had to bet, Gore's first act will be as audacious as his
broad-daylight theft of the presidency: changing the country's name to
The United States of Litigation. And who is Gore's chief lawyer? Why,
David Boies, a key player in the shameful prosecution of Microsoft. In
the Nov. 27 issue of Time, Cathy Booth Thomas lovingly described the
Democrats' Best Friend: "This is the guy who embarrassed Bill Gates on
the stand. The guy who wrestled $1.17 billion from drug companies for
fixing vitamin prices, who defeated the nation's biggest auction houses
and now represents everyone from Calvin Klein to Napster."

Just for good measure, Thomas concludes her mash note to Boies (and, by
association, all the trial lawyers who comprise an invaluable part of
the Democratic machine) with a comment from his wife. "Seeing him in the
courtroom, she says, is like seeing 'Baryshnikov at the ballet.'"

Campaign finance reform, often cited in Gore's fall stump speeches as
his paramount concern, probably will be put on the back burner. In the
postelection campaign he's collected-at the direction of his K St.
cronies-several million dollars to help pay for the hundreds of lawyers
now in Florida. Unlike George W. Bush, who's also trolled for money, the
specifics of Gore's funds aren't accessible to the public. Bush has also
imposed a $5000 limit on contributions.

Not all of Gore's patrons are eager to shell out more cash. In Monday's
Los Angeles Times, Peter Buttenwieser, who gave $1.3 million to the
Democratic cause for the 2000 election, was critical of Gore's campaign.
He said, in complaining that his advice went unheeded by the Gore team:
"[Y]ou have to give people a compelling, passionate reason to vote for
you as well as knocking down the other guy... The campaign was really
quite rejecting and disdainful."

And while the farce continues in Florida, Democratic legislators are
starting to get restless about a potential Gore presidency. No wonder.
Bush's consigliere in this mess, James Baker, was ridiculed more than a
week ago for making the obvious point that ballot machines are impartial
and can't put a subjective spin on a voter's "intent." Now that the
recount tallies for Gore haven't yet eliminated Bush's slim lead,
there's havoc in the canvassing rooms, with GOP accusations of Democrats
eating chads, ballots stuck together with tape and disputes over what
rules to follow.

You can hardly blame the volunteers and hourly workers for getting
testy: they're under the glare of the media, pressured by Democrat
partisans to achieve the "correct" results, and are unsure of when this
unruly process is going to end.

According to Monday's Washington Post, one of Gore's allies is
distressed about a possible Gore presidency. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin
said: "I think Gore has handled [the election recount] as well as he
could, but it's a very delicate situation. If he ends up the president,
he will feverishly reach out to members to try to build bridges. But he
will be carrying some Clinton-Gore baggage that's going to keep some
Republicans from wanting to work with him."

Considering that those dispirited remarks were on the record, you can
just imagine what's being bandied about behind closed doors, especially
after a couple of cocktails. In fact, in the same Post article, a
"Senate Democratic leader" agreed with Durbin that Gore could be in for
trouble. "The depth of resentment and the extraordinary hostility the
Republicans already have demonstrated towards the vice president is far
greater than the somewhat mild opposition that Democrats have expressed
about Bush."

Another sign that Gore's pals are nervous is the widespread refrain
that by this point the presidency isn't worth having. Albert Hunt,
writing in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal, voiced a sentiment
common in Washington's pundit/pol clique. "Whichever way this ends up,"
Hunt says, "a big bloc of the electorate won't accept it. So it wasn't
surprising the other day when two of the country's smartest
politicians-one a Bush-backing Republican, the other a Gore-supporting
Democrat-anonymously gave the same reply when asked which man's shoes
they'd rather be in: the one who loses."
Right, Al. He was probably gabbing with Bill Bradley and John McCain.

ELEPHANTS AND TURKEYS
AT THIS POINT, three days before Thanksgiving, I've learned to forsake
predictions, and won't even hazard a guess as to whether Gore or Bush
will win the White House, or when the results will finally be announced.
Even after Florida's Supreme Court shocked the Bush and Gore camps on
Friday afternoon-overruling Democratic Judge Terry Lewis' affirmation of
Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris' right to certify a
victor in the state on Saturday-suggesting the weekend would be
relatively quiet, the rollercoaster continued.

The liberal court, comprised of seven men and women appointed by
Democratic governors (Republican Jeb Bush was co-appointee of one
justice), was obviously buying time for the Veep, in hopes that the
helter-skelter, change-the-rules-as-we-go-along hand-counts in Broward,
Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties would jack up the vote total for
Gore. But the Democrats surrendered invaluable public relations points
when 1527 of the overseas absentee ballots, many of them from the
military, were arbitrarily disqualified by an overzealous battalion of
vote-counters. When it was revealed that Mark Herron, a Tallahassee
lawyer, had sent a five-page letter to Gore lawyers instructing them how
to impede the overseas vote, especially the military vote, GOP leaders
cried foul.

Herron was hired by the Democratic National Committee on Election
Night.

And so what was meant to be a slow-news weekend for the Gore campaign,
as they prepared briefs for Monday's court hearing, turned into a media
nightmare. As Gore's thug-in-chief Bill Daley found out, it's not wise
to mess with the military. Almost immediately, Gulf War hero Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf, a Bush supporter, said: "It is a very sad day in our
country when the men and women of the armed forces who are serving
abroad and facing danger on a daily basis...because of some technicality
out of their control...are denied the right to vote for the president of
the United States, who will be their commander-in-chief."

Cohen and Mad Maddy

And Secretary of Defense William Cohen, the lone Republican in Bill
Clinton's cabinet, spoke from Saudi Arabia on Sunday: "The last thing we
want to do is make it harder for those wearing our uniform and serving
overseas to be able to cast a ballot."

Incredibly, Gore, who's ridden the steed of sanctimony for the past
week about making sure every vote counted, didn't even try to stanch the
bad publicity by making a statement in support of the country's men and
women in the armed forces.

Instead, when complaints were first lodged about the curiously high
percentage of absentee ballots deemed unsatisfactory (some 40 percent),
Gore's spokesman Chris Lehane said: "[The Gore campaign] was saddened
and disappointed by the fact that the Bush camp has suddenly decided to
inject raw, crass, partisan politics into a situation that ought to be
guided by the laws of our land."

I'd have to check this out, but I believe in eye-for-an-eye countries
like Iraq or Iran, such outbursts of propaganda would cost Lehane his
tongue.

WHAT DO YOU SAY TO YOUR CHILDREN?
THE DAILY NEWS, owned by Clinton's friend Mort Zuckerman, ran an
editorial on Nov. 19 that read like it was dictated by Mark Fabiani.
Headlined "Give Demo-cracy Time to Count," the Gore advertisement
screeched: "[T]he counting of ballots went on-by humans, not
machines-ensuring that each person's vote will be tallied in accordance
with the law. And in accordance with a sacred mandate... Now, America
must wait for the complete tally of the manually counted ballots. This
knuckle-biter is democracy at work. And the nation, indeed the world,
has been getting a great civics lesson these past 12 days. And the
lesson is this: The American political system is surviving and working,
and this will only strengthen it."

The daft notion, not confined to the Daily News, that the country is
"getting a great civics lesson" is a dangerous lie that only serves to
mask the indisputable fact that Al Gore is attempting to steal an
election. In contrast, Watergate was a valuable two-year drama because
it had a beginning, middle and end. The steady diet of blockbuster
revelations about Richard Nixon's paranoid White House, as well as the
dramatic congressional hearings, vindicated a generation's suspicions
that the president was a crook and proved that he wasn't above the law.
Unfortunately, today's youth weren't as fortunate in Clinton's
impeachment. If justice had been served, and the U.S. Senate had more
men and women of honor in it, he'd have been tossed straight back to
Arkansas.

The Simpsons

My eight-year-old son is at an age where he's curious about current
events, especially those that are discussed at the dinner table, on the
soccer field and after The Simpsons, when he often watches Hardball with
me. Like any politically innocent child, he parrots his parents' views
and is rooting for Bush to win the presidency. Every day he asks
impatiently, "Is it over yet? Who won?" I've spared him the complex
details of this sordid farce-it's an election he'll study in high
school-but there's no way to spin the reality that these past two weeks
have sullied the concept of American democracy.

How do you explain to a second-grader the ugly chain of events that
have taken place since Election Day?

He simply doesn't understand yet that the elite ruling class of this
country will do or say anything to catapult their chosen candidate into
office.

Consider the following sampling of anti-Republican rhetoric in just the
past week:

The Boston Globe's David Nyhan, Nov. 17: "Many of us are put off by
Texas justice and Texas ways. We do not like the way Texas treats its
citizens and its environment. I look at Bush Sr. [sic] and I see Willie
Horton. I look at Bush Jr. [sic] and I see 145 hooded, manacled
prisoners wheeled into death chambers, the latest of them another
retarded man, as the metronome Texas guillotine drops again."
By contrast, I look at the state of Massachusetts and see the Kennedy
clan protected from criminal prosecution for felonies that would put
less well-connected citizens behind bars. I look at Rep. Patrick
Kennedy, the son of Chappaquidick Teddy, and see a slow-witted man who's
willingly been used as a puppet by Dick Gephardt to trade on his name
and raise millions of the same "soft money" that Democrats are
supposedly opposed to.

Slate's David Plotz, ridiculing former Secretary of State James Baker,
Nov. 17: "Despite Baker's statesman persona, he will probably be
remembered for being what he hates: a handler. He had a few modest
achievements at State and Treasury [the U.S. victory in the Gulf War is
now considered "modest"] but never had any vision for the jobs beyond
his next tactical move. He lost his only run for office-Texas attorney
general in 1978-and abandoned the idea of running for president in 1996
before the campaign started... But schlepping to Florida to clean up
another Bush mess surely makes [Baker] seethe. He wanted to be one of
the powers that be. Instead he's America's most famous janitor."

So if Baker is a "janitor," what honorific would Plotz, a Gore
supporter, confer upon Daley and Christopher? Statesmen?

Eddie

Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe, Nov. 17: "Now that Bush wants a
15-minute election, it is much more sinister. The speed with which Bush
wants to end the Florida presidential recount is the sign that the party
animal is now a political gangster. He has gone from Eddie Haskell to Al
Capone. Voters are waiting in Florida for someone to count their votes.
Bush has decided to silence them with the Gatling gun of raw power...
All that remains is for Bush to dump the bodies without being caught for
ditching democracy."

By contrast, Daily News columnist Mike Barnicle told Hardball host
Chris Matthews on Nov. 13 that the Republicans can't match the likes of
Daley when it comes to a street fight. "Watching them," he said, "is
like watching people going to a gunfight wearing mittens."

To which Matthews replied, "Why are they so aristocratic? Is that just
their nature?"

Strange, I didn't think America's aristocracy was so much to be found
in the Deep South or the Plains states that Bush won so handily.
Matthews is a longtime student of politics, and worked for Jimmy Carter
and Tip O'Neill, so it's surprising he still thinks the "Rockefeller
Republicans" control the party.

On the other hand, Clinton/Gore lackey Paul Begala, an awful writer who
now works for MSNBC, completely contradicted the views of Barnicle and
Matthews with a hateful commentary on Nov. 13. Begala, a native Texan,
doesn't believe Republicans are one bit aristocratic. In fact, they're
the scourge of the nation.

He writes: "Yes, Barnicle is right when he notes that tens of millions
of good people in Middle America voted Republican. But if you look
closely at that map...you see the state where James Byrd was
lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart... You see
the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for
the crime of being gay... You see the state where right-wing extremists
blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal
employees."

So, according to Begala, the evil that exists in America is found
strictly in the states that voted for Bush. I believe that any citizen
of New York City, Republican or Democrat, would dispute that theory. And
what about California, the land of O.J. Simpson and the Mendendez
brothers? Last time I checked, homicide, gang violence, rape and drug
addiction were still plaguing the cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia,
Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and Boston, all located in states
that voted for
Gore.

JWR contributor "Mugger" -- aka Russ Smith -- is the editor-in-chief and CEO of New York Press (www.nypress.com). Send your comments to him by clicking here.